Curated playlist
American computer scientists
- Paul WerbosPaul Werbos, a social scientist, first formally described backpropagation in his 1974 dissertation.
- John SchulmanJohn Schulman's first big project, a BattleBots robot, was never built. The reading it inspired led him to OpenAI.
- Vernor VingeWhat happens when machines get smarter than the people who built them? Vernor Vinge kept asking.
- Jon KleinbergJon Kleinberg found that a web page can matter because of where it sends you.
- Larry PageLarry Page, the co-founder of Google, once held a cheque for $100,000 that was made out to a company that did not exist. Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, wrote it to "Google, Inc." before anyone had filed the…
- Sergey BrinSergey Brin, co-founder of Google, helped build a search tool that grew faster than its makers expected. His partner Larry Page later recalled the moment the project began to feel real: "Pretty soon, we had 10,000 searches a day. And we…
- John von NeumannJohn von Neumann's father asked Theodore von Kármán to talk his son out of mathematics.
- Nick SzaboIn 1998, Nick Szabo designed a digital currency called bit gold. It was never built but is called a Bitcoin precursor.
- Katherine JohnsonKatherine Johnson was the mathematician an astronaut asked for by name. NASA was using electronic computers for the first time to calculate John Glenn's orbit of the Earth. Officials turned to Johnson to verify the machine's numbers,…
- Marvin MinskyIn 1951, Marvin Minsky built the first randomly wired neural network learning machine. He called it SNARC.
- Arthur Samuel (computer scientist)Arthur Samuel's checkers program moved IBM's stock up 15 points in a single night. He coined "machine learning" in 1959.
- Daniel HuttenlocherIn 2019, Daniel Huttenlocher became the first dean of MIT's new Schwarzman College of Computing.
- Terry WinogradTerry Winograd once taught a computer to obey commands about toy blocks.
- David ChaumDavid Chaum's 1982 dissertation held nearly every idea behind the blockchain.
- Edward FredkinEdward Fredkin never finished college, yet MIT made him a full professor in 1968. Marvin Minsky recruited him.
- Donald KnuthDonald Knuth, an American computer scientist born in 1938, pays $2.56 to anyone who finds a mistake in one of his books. The number is deliberate. As he explains it, 256 pennies make one hexadecimal dollar. A smaller reward of $0.32 goes…
- John McCarthy (computer scientist)John McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence" in the summer of 1956. He also created the language Lisp.
- Judea PearlJudea Pearl gave computers a way to reason when facts are incomplete.
- Grace HopperGrace Hopper hung a clock on her office wall that ran counterclockwise. She wanted code in plain English.
- Steve WozniakSteve Wozniak, nicknamed Woz, built his first computer in June 1971. A newspaper reporter destroyed it by stepping on the power supply cable. He had built the machine with his friend Bill Fernandez as a self-taught engineering project. It…